• Areas of Excellence

    Campbell STEM’s areas of academic excellence consist of the staff's ability to incorporate STEM into the general curriculum on a daily basis. The staff also does a great job of including the Engineer Design process into incentive activities and opportunities for learning around the school. Collaborating with our community occurs on a regular basis. This includes integrating them into the STEM process to support our students in their learning with hands-on activities. 

     

    Campbell STEM’s vision includes “developing lifelong learners” which our leaders model through continual professional development. All stakeholders including staff, families, School Business Partners, and community members work together to embrace and support student efforts as identified in our school mission “Support, Teach, Empower, and Motivate”. This is done through providing students with opportunities in peer mentoring, modeling, students being in charge of their learning, and STEM professional guest speakers. We support student critical thinking. The Campbell STEM community encourages innovation, critical thinking, engagement and problem-solving in our everyday conversations and experiences. Students are provided with the opportunity to attend lunch and learn where they obtain knowledge from field experts in STEM careers. 

     

    Challenges and failures are highly celebrated at Campbell STEM. Students support one another, working in collaboration to persevere, communicate ideas with one another, and share solutions and strategies. Students are taught that it is all stakeholders' responsibility to embrace the schools' mission to Support, Teach, Empower, and Motivate. As a stakeholder, students are taught that they can accomplish the school's mission with peers, staff, and community members. Students are eager to engage with one another by sharing and supporting knowledge as they solve meaningful problems. Relevance and purpose are the driving force for all learning at Campbell STEM. Students eagerly share their learning with one another to identify solutions to real-world problems through presentations, cross-grade level teaching, showcases, etc. 

     

    Areas of Improvement

    The staff at Campbell STEM are always seeking to improve instructional practices through continuing professional development, planning, and working with our stakeholders and Community School Business Partners. We have identified that there is an area for targeted professional development in PLC practices to improve instruction. The area of growth indicated by staff on a survey was - what to do after the assessment? What do we do with the assessment data? 

    Another area of growth indicated by staff was developing a plan to support new staff that have not received instruction in STEM education instructional practices. In the last three years, we have had new staff become part of our Campbell STEM team who lack STEM educational experience. Some professional development has been provided, but it has not been systematic and a plan of support needs to be created. 

    The Campbell STEM Leadership team will meet this summer to develop a plan of support to provide professional development for new staff and a refresher for veteran staff focusing on STEM instruction and practices. In addition, the team will create a 1-5 year professional development goal plan where we will address the need for targeted professional development in PLC practices. This will include a deep dive into looking at assessments, data collected from assessments, what we do after we have the data, and the next steps. This will help staff to further our STEM instruction and build into our positive school culture.

     

    Challenges

    The biggest challenge addressed by Campbell STEM staff is time for planning. In addition to daily STEM instruction, Campbell STEM conducts Explorations, STEM Days, family events, Science/STEM Fair, and incentives. These events take time to plan. In a survey, staff stated that they need more time for long planning for units of study and integration of PBL’s. The survey concluded that staff need larger chunks of time to meet and plan. Campbell STEM is looking into funding so that we can provide this time on a quarterly basis. We have applied for some grants and will look into local businesses for support.